But most of the time, Cooper is in a relaxed and humorous (however sardonic, especially on such subjects as politics and religion) mood. The old man has been driving large rigs (he says) since he was seventeen years old. He’s never had a wife, family, or home (he says) and has never wanted one. His cab has been his ark—his words—through all the “floods of shit” that have been dropped on America by a pissed-off God in his lifetime.
Val can’t seem to get enough of the old reprobate’s barbed but almost iambic commentaries. I watch Val’s gleaming eyes across the campfire and think of young Prince Hal in Eastcheap’s Boar’s-Head Tavern at the rhetorical feet of Falstaff. (I was one of those scholars who infinitely preferred Falstaff—a source of wit not only in himself but in others and a potential Aristotle/Socrates tutor of the true humanities to the young prince in training—to the wordy killing-machine-cum-lying-politician that Henry V became in Shakespeare’s work, however moving the much-trotted-out “band of brothers” St. Crispin’s Day speech may be.)
But I digress.
Val actually said something to me yesterday in a tone devoid of the contempt, guardedness, and sarcasm that have ruled all his speech in my presence for the last four years or so.
—I could be a trucker, Grandpa.
I said nothing at the time but I came close to weeping to hear those few unguarded words slip out. (Including, I admit, the childish “Grandpa” that I’ve missed so very much.) Val has not spoken of being or becoming anything—other than his unconscious but continuous attempt at becoming a black-hole source of disillusionment so unrelenting as to approach pure nihilism—since he was twelve years old.
Before I become too sentimental, I need to remind myself here that it is likely that my grandson killed someone last week. Or at least tried to kill someone.
He seemed almost in shock that last Friday night in Los Angeles when he saw the photograph of his dead friend William Coyne on the 3DHD screen. The only thing I could get out of him about the attack on Advisor Omura in the first forty-eight hours of our flight was his repeated statement—I was with those idiot fuckers, but I didn’t shoot at Omura, Leonard. I swear it.
But Val never said clearly that he hadn’t shot someone, and the few times I brought up the Coyne boy’s name, Val’s violent reaction—his gaze dropping, his head snapping to look in another direction, his entire body stiffening—suggested to me that something had happened between the two adolescents on that last night in Los Angeles.
Whatever the source of the trauma in L.A., Val dealt with it by sleeping most of the time we weren’t stopped for rest during those first few days or nights. Because of the way he slept—twitching, shaking—I thought he might be using flashback, but a cursory search of his duffel bag while he slept didn’t turn up any vials of the drug.
It did turn up a black pistol which I considered confiscating but decided to leave in his duffel. We might need it before this trip is over.
When Val was awake during the daylight hours on the third through fifth days of our exile, I listened in as he quizzed Julio and Perdita on the security details of our convoy.
It seems that our convoy consists of twenty-three eighteen-wheelers, some of which are armed with mini-guns and other serious weapons, while we’re also accompanied by four combat vehicles and a small recon-attack helicopter. The combat vehicles—I forget the details about their armament and such, but Val visibly devoured every caliber and horsepower and armor fact with great interest—are manned by mercenaries from a security company called TrekSec and paid for by these independent truckers or their firms.
Perdita showed us on their satellite nav system that another such convoy, made up of seventeen vehicles, is traveling about fifteen miles ahead of us and a much larger one is about twenty-four miles behind us on I-15. They keep in touch with one another.
According to Julio, the main problem on the Las Vegas–to-Mesquite-and-beyond-to–St. George stretch of I-15 is bandits, although the reconquista still make their occasional foray into the southern reaches of Nevada. Nuevo Mexico’s cartels’ repeated failures at adding Las Vegas to their territory is, according to Julio, forcing the reconquista military forays to be less and less frequent. He added that the increasingly effective anglo guerrilla raids around Kingman and Flagstaff have pretty effectively tied down the N.M. occupation forces over the past year or two.
Our immediate problem, Julio and Perdita showed us, lies just beyond the embattled and mostly abandoned town of Mesquite ahead where I-15 crosses from Nevada to Arizona and from the Pacific Time Zone into the Mountain Time Zone: the twenty-nine miles of Interstate that make their tiny cut across the northwest corner of Arizona and then into Utah and north have been wonderfully scenic and composed mostly of elevated highway, but bandits and warring U.S. and N.M. forces have dropped most of those bridges and elevated sections over the past decade.
Because of the Mormon Range and other mountains that run north and south along the state border like a sheer wall, the convoys will take an entire day picking their way along rubble-strewn makeshift surface roads—just ruts through the tumbled boulders and slabs of the former highway—along the Virgin River into Utah. Julio showed us satellite images of the winding canyon road where the trucks will be vulnerable to any bandit on the clifftops who wants to roll rocks down on us.
—Can’t we just go around? asked Val. Take a detour to the north?
Perdita showed us how there are no roads except desert tracks and dry gullies along the forty miles or so north of Mesquite to the tiny, abandoned towns of Carp and Elgin along the misnamed Meadow Valley Wash dry river, then almost a two-hundred-mile detour on old state roads 93 and 319 into Utah on their battered Highway 56.
—The twenty-nine miles in Arizona called the Diagonal of Death by truckers is slow and dangerous, said Julio. But it’s still faster than any of the half-assed detours. We’re still truckers. We need to get products to their destination on time.
So tonight we’re sleeping in a defensive circle off the highway just short of the abandoned town of Bunkerville. The name is appropriate, since a few military bunkers remain here.
A mile to the east, the mountains rise up like some terrible obstacle in one of the J.R.R. Tolkien–inspired movies. The opening for the Virgin River and the former I-15 looks like a dark and open maw—waiting.
We’ll be moving at first light. Perdita assured us that with the recon helicopter and our convoy’s firepower, there shouldn’t be a serious confrontation—just ten hours of bumping and jolting along in the truck’s lowest gears.